Rafaello's Mistress

by Lynne Graham

  ‘I’ll make it good,’ Rafaello swore with roughened tenderness.

  Her heart started accelerating to a hammer-beat again and everything she had been feeling before that brief instant of pain returned to her tenfold. Suddenly she was with him again, losing the power of thought and then control, arching up to match his fluid thrusts, discovering a pagan rhythm all of her own. Her breath coming in shallow pants, she gave herself up to the powerful excitement building higher and higher within her. He drove her, gasping, to a dizzy peak and nothing could have surpassed the sheer wondrous sensation that gripped her writhing body with an ecstasy of pleasure.

  Glory drifted back to the land of the living to find herself still plastered as close to Rafaello as an extra layer of skin. Finding no fault whatsoever with that discovery, she snuggled even closer and could not control the dreamy smile stretching her mouth. Paradise was being in his arms, she decided, breathing in the hot, damp, sexy scent of him as if he was a drug she needed to survive. She felt amazingly tender and affectionate towards him and only just resisted an urge to smother him in loving kisses.

  Rafaello tensed. ‘Quit snuggling,’ he told her drily.

  Glory froze as if the roof had come down on top of her. Before she could even react to that apparent rejection that just seized her up with pain, Rafaello rolled her flat onto her back against the pillows and leant over her. He brushed her tumbled honey-blonde hair back from her brow, dropped an unexpected kiss on her reddened mouth and smiled down at her.

  It was that glorious smile that finally convinced her that she had misread his signals. When he had urged her to quit he had been teasing, and her heart went crazy when she recognised the easy humour curving the relaxed line of his sculpted mouth. ‘You have really shocked me,’ he confided huskily.

  Glory kept on smiling. All was right within her immediate world. She was brimming full of happiness purely because he was happy. By no means did he look dissatisfied by his recent discovery that she was not the skilful partner he had expected. And in no way was she dissatisfied with him.

  ‘I’ve got no excuse. I can’t defend myself. I should have listened to you, bella mia,’ Rafaello conceded with an amount of regretful humility she would never have believed a male of his unquenchable assurance could display.

  ‘Yes, you should’ve,’ Glory agreed, but she was quick to snake her arms round him again lest he think she was withholding forgiveness.

  ‘I’m just amazed,’ Rafaello admitted, surveying her with frowning fascination. ‘You’ve been knee-deep in predatory men all these years and you didn’t succumb to one of them. Yet you’re not a cold woman.’

  ‘You’re more persuasive than the rest,’ Glory confided shyly.

  ‘Evidently…’ Rafaello rolled over and sat up. ‘You’ve just blown a great big hole in my image of you as calculating.’

  ‘I guess…’ Glory was now feeling so buoyant she was vaguely surprised that she wasn’t floating round the ceiling. Flipping onto her side, she surveyed him. Dear heaven, just looking at him made her feel dreamy and silly. She wanted to ease back into physical contact with him but was afraid of seeming too clingy. She wanted to hug him again. She wanted to tell him he was wonderful…she wanted to tell him she loved him. Odd how she had wanted to tell him that before she had even admitted it to herself, she acknowledged in a daze. It was pretty naff, her still being so keen on him after five years apart, she reflected ruefully. It didn’t say much for her ability to move on, did it? But then, it was not something she planned to share with him.

  ‘Although I confess to being very grateful that you were sufficiently calculating to accept that we were going to end up in bed sooner rather than later,’ Rafaello was saying while he toyed with a straying blonde strand of her wildly tousled mane of hair.

  Glory’s brow furrowed. She wondered if she had missed a line of explanation somewhere. ‘Sorry…what do you mean?’

  Rafaello released a rueful sigh and tugged at her hair as to reprove her for her evident lack of concentration. ‘When I realised that the only contraception I had was in another room I was very relieved to discover that you were better organised than I was, cara.’

  Glory was now very still and when her voice emerged it was rather strained. ‘Better organised?’

  ‘On my last stay here, this room was being decorated and I used the one next door,’ he explained.

  Glory remembered his opening the drawer in the bedside cabinet. Having only briefly wondered what he was looking for, she now felt unbelievably stupid. Rafaello had been reaching for protection.

  ‘A virgin who takes care of contraception in advance is a very sensible woman.’

  To Glory, that statement seemed to hang there in the air between them like a giant rock about to fall on her. Her opinion of her own common sense dive-bombed. ‘But…but I didn’t take care of contraception,’ she admitted in a very small voice.

  ‘Run that by me again,’ Rafaello breathed, abandoning all play with her hair, his Italian accent screaming at her the way it always did when he was very tense.

  ‘I’m not taking any precautions or using anything,’ Glory clarified shakily.

  Rafaello’s hard jawline clenched. Narrowed dark eyes scanned her anxious upturned face and an expression of incredulous fury slowly fired his gaze. In a sudden movement that made her flinch, he sprang out of the bed. ‘But I asked you if it was OK to make love to you!’

  A silence, fragile as a sheet of glass about to smash, stretched.

  Her heart sinking, Glory gulped. ‘When I said yes, I thought you meant that question literally…I didn’t know you were asking whether or not it might be s-safe,’ she stammered, ready to curl up and die as she realised how foolish she had been. ‘I didn’t think—’

  ‘You didn’t think. So you’re trying to say that it was only a simple misunderstanding?’ Rafaello ground out, glittering dark golden eyes smouldering with furious condemnation, his accent thick as molasses. ‘Do you honestly think I’ll believe anything that unlikely?’

  ‘What else could it have been but a misunderstanding?’ Glory was sincerely taken aback by his attitude.

  ‘How about a textbook case of entrapment?’ Rafaello shot at her with lethal contempt, his hard cheekbones prominent beneath his bronzed skin, accentuating his ferocious tension.

  ‘Entrapment?’ she repeated without comprehension.

  ‘I really fell for it, didn’t I?’ Rafaello raked at her fiercely. ‘And, knowing my luck where you’re concerned, you’ll probably fall pregnant—’

  ‘I hope not…’ It was a stricken whisper.

  Shattered by his suspicions, Glory was frozen to the bed. How could he think that she would deliberately run the risk of unprotected sex? How could he believe that she would welcome an unplanned pregnancy? The mere prospect of such a development terrified Glory. She had an instant vision of unwed motherhood combined with horrendous poverty. One or two of her schoolfriends had taken that route within a couple of years of leaving school and had lived to regret the choice.

  ‘Do you really? If I’ve knocked you up I’ll be keeping you and the kid for the next twenty years at least!’ Rafaello informed her in outraged conclusion. ‘That’s a bloody high price to pay for your precious virginity. I need a shower!’

  As he strode into the connecting bathroom and the door slammed shut Glory felt gutted. Her happiness had been so short-lived that it now seemed like an illusion she had dreamt up. How could he imagine that she would sink that low? Was there no end to his distrust? What sort of an idiot had she been to think that she could so easily change his opinion of her? And wasn’t she now getting exactly what she deserved for her foolishness?

  Nothing was ever going to change. He was very rich. She was poor. There was no equality and there never would be. Without the equality, maybe respect and trust could not exist, she reasoned wretchedly. She was Glory Little, the gardener’s daughter, the gypsy’s daughter, the factory worker. He was Rafaello Grazzini, an extremely succe
ssful businessman and famed for his entrepreneurial skills.

  He was hurting her again. How could she be letting him do that to her a second time? Didn’t she ever learn? She had agreed to be his mistress. He had said he only wanted sex. She had given him what he wanted. End of story. What on earth had she been doing, clinging to him? A textbook case of entrapment? Glory shuddered, nausea stirring in her sensitive stomach. As if she was some greedy, scheming little tramp he had picked up off a street corner!

  She threw herself off the bed and viewed the tangled bedsheets with shamefaced discomfiture. Well, retribution had come even faster than she had warned. ‘If you don’t value yourself, no man will,’ her mother had once told her harshly. So what had she expected to achieve when she had sold herself? Choking tears of regret clogging her aching throat, Glory knew she needed to get a grip on herself before she risked facing Rafaello again. But her dress was nowhere to be seen. Just as she was wondering if her dress lay beneath the bedspread heaped on the carpet, she heard the shower switch off and panic filled her.

  As her case was still downstairs, she raced over to the sleek built-in units that covered one wall and yanked open a door. Seeing a row of shirts hanging, she trailed one off a hanger and dug her arms into it at frantic speed. Within ten seconds she was out of the bedroom and hurrying down the stairs. Catching a glimpse of Rafaello’s manservant clearing a table in one of the ground-floor rooms, she realised that the only true sanctuary available was the outdoors. As she sped out of the front door, emerging into the bright path of the outside lights, she found herself in the very teeth of a surprisingly strong wind. But she hesitated only a moment before she fled down the path to the beach and into the cover of the tamarisk trees ringing the cove.

  CHAPTER SIX

  GLORY could not credit that she had come out to a fabulous, scenic Greek island in the month of June only to find herself fighting to walk through a howling gale with sand blowing in her face.

  The sea was foaming like a cauldron, mirroring the seething tempest of emotion inside her. Rafaello despised her. He truly did. She had to accept that but she didn’t want to accept that, couldn’t bear to accept that, she discovered. All the messy feelings she had buried five years earlier were escaping their bonds. Taking shelter beneath an overhanging rock in the massive outcrop near the end of the beach, she sat down, closing out the angry surge of the surf. With those painful emotions came the memories…

  Glory had left school at sixteen. She had wanted to stay on but her father had asserted that no Little had ever been academic, and she had found work as an office junior at the local auctioneers. By the time she reached eighteen, sightings of Rafaello had become rare events. After all, the Grazzinis had divided their time between their Italian and English homes and, having completed his business degree, Rafaello had bought a London apartment and only visited Montague Park occasionally.

  Glory had taken a long time to come to terms with their first humiliating encounter when she was sixteen and the horror of having been delivered home to her furious parents like a juvenile delinquent. When, afterwards, Rafaello would drive past Glory and award her a nod or smile of recognition, she would barely raise her head in acknowledgement. Yet, in spite of the lack of encouragement, one week after her eighteenth birthday Rafaello had raked his Ferrari to a halt in the drive and offered her a lift.

  ‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ Glory had told him through the window he lowered, straining every sinew to play it cool while striving not to overdo it.

  ‘How would you like to go out to dinner tonight?’

  She had got into his passenger seat almost before he finished speaking.

  ‘That was the magic combination, was it?’ Rafaello had murmured with a slanting smile that turned her all-too-vulnerable heart upside-down and left her dizzy.

  ‘Maybe I’m just hungry.’ The truth would have been that she had never been invited out for a meal. The males she met invited her to bars, clubs, sports fixtures and the cinema.

  For the following six weeks Glory had walked on air and her feet hadn’t touched the ground once. True, mixing with his friends had sometimes been a strain. She had discovered entire conversational topics that had previously been unknown to her. Winter skiing, opera, ballet, yachting and the total agony of not being able to locate the latest must-have designer handbag. While warning her that only grief could be coming in her direction, her own friends had pooled their clothes and loaned her outfits to wear. Dating Rafaello had been something of a community effort.

  The talent scout who had sighted her out at a club one evening had tried to get her to sign up with a modelling agency in the north. She had felt terribly flattered but Rafaello had squashed any dreams she might have cherished on that score at source.

  ‘You’re too small to be a fashion model. The guy can’t be legit. Alternatively, you could find yourself fronting a knitting pattern or some such thing.’

  Which Glory had quite understood roughly translated into the news that he did not want her chasing after a modelling career a few hundred miles away. Since the only thing in her life she truly cared about at that time was him, she had thought no more about that offer. Soon after that Rafaello had persuaded her to let him give her a tour of Montague Park, but before they had even completed the circuit of the ground floor his father had interrupted them. Glory had immediately recognised that Benito Grazzini, though he made every effort to hide the fact, was very much shocked to discover that his son was dating his gardener’s daughter.

  ‘He doesn’t like me seeing you,’ she had said to Rafaello afterwards.

  ‘He was just surprised. That’s all. You’re too sensitive,’ Rafaello had told her.

  But that same week Benito Grazzini had called at the cottage on Glory’s afternoon off. Even worse, that same day her own father was upstairs sleeping off his drinking excesses, rather than out working as he should have been. Ironically, Benito Grazzini had looked awful, his eyes sunk in his head as if he hadn’t slept for days and his greyish pallor no more healthy. But he had wasted no time in spelling out his terms.

  As soon as he had told her that her father would be sacked if she did not do as he asked, she had known she had no choice. If she appealed to Rafaello for support she would only be making trouble which would rebound on her family. Rafaello was close to his father but she had only been dating him for a paltry six weeks, and, while she might be in love with him, he had made no such claims. Sobered up, Archie Little had fully supported his daughter’s decision to surrender and leave home.

  Glory had decided that the easiest way out of her predicament would be to tell Rafaello that she was accepting the modelling offer. At the time, Rafaello had been only weeks off spending four months setting up a branch office in Rome and she had already been afraid that that separation would end his interest in her. However, she had naïvely believed that they could part as friends.

  The following afternoon that she spent with Rafaello had been one long, agonising torment for her to endure until she worked up the courage to tell him that she was going away as well.

  ‘Let me get this straight…you are dumping me?’ Rafaello had interrupted with a stunned look stamped on his darkly handsome features.

  ‘No, it’s not like that. It’s just that I’m leaving and you’re going to be abroad most of the time…I can’t imagine when we’d see each other, so isn’t a clean break better?’

  ‘It’s no big deal,’ Rafaello had confirmed while he smiled steadily at her.

  Then she had become the author of her own humiliation. It had already been arranged that they would join his friends for dinner that evening at an exclusive local restaurant. ‘Can we still go ahead with tonight?’ Glory had begged, desperate to spend every last possible moment with him.

  ‘Why not?’

  He had called her an hour before he was due to pick her up to inform her that he would be late and that he would meet her there instead. He had even sent a taxi for her and she had had not a clue what
was waiting for her on her arrival. She could still remember that long, slow walk across the restaurant and her own stumbling, demeaning retreat from the sight of Rafaello kissing the very lovely redhead before he pulled away again.

  As if it was a moment trapped in time she recalled how he had looked across the table at her with callous cool as though he didn’t recognise her, as though she was nothing, nobody. It had felt as though everyone in the room was staring at her and laughing, and his friends had certainly been entertained by the scene of her downfall.

  Rafaello hadn’t changed, Glory reflected wretchedly as her mind returned to the more pressing problems of the present. He always assumed the worst and he attacked without hesitation. Would he have been so quick to accuse a woman who came from his own privileged background? Of course not. But assuming that Glory could only be on the make came very naturally to him. She shivered, only then registering that the sea spray lashing off the rocks had soaked her to the skin.

  ‘Glory!’

  Hearing that shout, she tensed and saw Rafaello running through the surf towards the rocks. His pale shirt and trousers glimmered in the moonlight. Evidently he had come out in as much of a hurry as she had, for he was barefoot. The wind whipped his shirt back from his bronzed, muscular chest.

  ‘Glory!’ He sounded frantic and she felt childish hiding from him.

  Slowly and stiffly, because her chilled limbs were numb, she emerged from her shelter. For a split-second, Rafaello stilled when he saw her and then he powered over to her at even greater speed. He caught her to him. ‘When I couldn’t find you I thought you had drowned,’ he launched down at her in raw condemnation. ‘Don’t you ever do this to me again!’